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jujubean45
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Country: United States
State: Illinois
Interests: Eugene Curran Kelly, Norma Jean Mortenson, Leung Chiu-Wai, and Frances Ethel Gumm, to name a few.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Art
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
11/30/2002
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| Where does it hurt the most?
My mom and I have an interesting relationship with pain. We know where and how best to hurt each other.
Nearly every weekend, she hands me her arthritic right wrist and I know exactly where to apply pressure. Kneading the web of flesh between her thumb and first finger, she lets out a small yelp. That's good pain, she says. Pulling her second and third fingers away from each other, she groans. Yes, you know where the points are. I rub muscles and bend arms, but most times, I dig my knuckles into her. It's strange, but sometimes I innately know where her pressure points are. A few nights ago, I pushed my finger deep into her stomach. She didn't like it at first, but after a while, she didn't seem to mind as I pressed again.
She never seems to ask anyone else to do this for her, just me. When she was growing up, her mentor taught her how to do traditional healing, whereby a patient would walk in with some joint or muscle ache, and she would know which part to pull, press or rub to set it right. She never taught me, but secretly I think I inherited this strange ability, not to deliver pain, but the right kind of pain. When she yanks her wrist away, I've given her the wrong pain. When she moans in agony but keeps her wrist in my warm hands, I know it's right. It's a feeling I understand and grew up with. Whenever I came home with a sprained ankle or a fat shiner on my leg, I would have to give it to her as she rubbed it until I went numb with pain. You need to feel the pain now, she'd say, as she rubbed medicine all over my bruise.
Yes, I know very well how much it hurts now.
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| Who would you wake up at 3am to see?
There aren't many, but there is at least one person.
Back in December, someone gave me the opportunity to meet this man. He said I would have to fly out that very evening, spend the night in a dusty trailer on a military base in the middle of nowhere, and wake up very early to get in line. No one told me that I would also have to stand in the bitter cold for nearly 3 hours with hundreds of other people, and just so I could have the very remote chance of shaking his hand.
But I was (and still am) so young and foolish, so I signed up immediately.
That morning, I dragged myself out of bed, put on my best (only) suit jacket and two layers of pants, and mustered outside with all the other folks. They weren't exactly die-hard fans of this man, but just wanted to shake his hand and hear what he had to say. I admit I wasn't a die-hard myself, but he had always intrigued me. The media had for years lambasted him, and somebody the day before had even thrown a shoe in anger and disgrace. In my mind, he seemed like an ordinary Joe thrust into an extraordinary circumstance, and though he handled all things with civility and modesty, was still roundly criticized for not being more civil, more modest, more perfect. Unfortunately, the people around me represented the very small minority of folks who still trusted in what he had to say and thought at the very least that he was a decent guy.
I huddled by a musty green army tank for 3 hours, gnawing on the only piece of food that I (or anybody else) had in our pockets-- an oily Slim Jim. I thought myself the wisest person out of the hundreds standing there, with a piece of food and a good book... until I realized I didn't have the one thing everyone and their mother had wisely packed in anxious anticipation -- a camera.
So when Air Force One glided in at daybreak, everyone else straightened up, clicked away ferociously, and cheered and pushed to the front of the queue as I stood there watching.
You will just have to believe me when I say I shook his hand.
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| I'm back
There must be a correlation between the misery of a country and the number of stars you can see in their night sky. In the happy countries, you can never see any -- all those neon brights and blinding floodlights keep us amused, while the more depressed nations have nothing more than moonbeams to entertain.
If that's true, I must have been to the saddest country of them all.
I won't tell you where I was. Maybe it's better kept a mystery to imagine a place where darkness is so dark that you would need car lights to find the ground and night goggles to see other people standing in front of you. It was a bit of a novelty tripping around in such a lightless society, but once I looked up, I thought I was standing in a planetarium. I told everyone else to look up and we just about lost our collective breaths. It was like the 4th of July -- we stopped talking and started ogling at the sky, with more stars than we'd ever seen in our lives. One guy told us where this-and-that constellation was, and I just strained my neck, trying to count, trying to take a mental snapshot so I wouldn't ever forget what the sky looked like with no lights at all.
I'm back in my happy country, where the stars are distant and dim, but I'll always remember that the sky I saw back there is the same sky here. I just see it differently. | | |
| When was the last time you were admitted to the hospital?
Last Thursday, I rode in an ambulance for the first time. It was a pretty surreal experience laying on a stretcher, with medics asking me a slew of questions. One asked me for my name. Another wanted to know who the president of the United States was. "George Bush?" I said, then re-traced the thought in my mind.
It was there in the ambulance that I realized why some people actually like being sick. There's a thrill in being the center of attention, being lifted up into a screaming van, then transferred to a large sterile building where more people will gently prod you for an EKG, blood work, or a urine sample, and your only requirement is to relax. When a doctor poked his head into my hospital room, his first words to me were, "I know you want to get out of here as soon as possible," to which I secretly thought, "What, and miss all this lavish attention?" Then I looked at myself and noticed that the nurses had already stripped me of most of my clothing and replaced it with a hospital gown. I didn't even realize how comfortable I was.
I was admitted to the hospital because I started hyperventilating and shivering from being outdoors too long. When people called the medics, I remember repeating like a mantra, "I'm fine, I'm fine," so much that even when I was being hauled away in the stretcher, I continued to mutter, "But I'm fine...I'm fine." It wasn't until the ambulance drove away ten minutes later that I started to think that maybe I wasn't breathing right, and maybe I was a little colder and more anxious than normal. Maybe something was wrong.
But I'm fine now... I'm fine.
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| How almost?
When I heard someone yell, "You're almost there!" shortly after the 25th mile, I wanted to find him and shout back into his ear, "How almost?" 'Cause I didn't see the finish line anywhere -- just crowds and crowds of people cheering and clapping and waving posterboards and screaming.
Next time I cheer for runners, remind me to never say "You're almost there." It almost builds on the athletes' delusions that all they have to do is run a few more inches and then they'd stumble across the finish line. When really, it's another half a mile, another hill, another eternal 5 minutes before you even see the end.
And then, it's over.
The two best parts of this race were seeing my friends pushing themselves to the front of the crowd so they could catch a glimpse of me from the sidelines, and mile 24, when I met up with the 4-hour pace group for the first time. I had intended to run a 4:00 marathon, but the jock in me pushed out too fast. Seeing the pace group eliminated any delusions that I had gone too slow, and gave my legs that much-needed incentive.
Race: Marine Corps Marathon
Time: 4:02
Pace: 9:13/mile
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